Manish Gupta Interviews

Manish Gupta Interviews – VP, Xerox Corporation | IBEF

Manish Gupta is currently Vice President at Xerox Corporation and Director of Xerox Research Centre India. Previously, he has served as Managing Director, Technology Division, Goldman Sachs India, and Director, IBM Research - India and Chief Technologist, IBM India/South Asia.

Manish Gupta is currently Vice President at Xerox Corporation and Director of Xerox Research Centre India. Previously, he has served as Managing Director, Technology Division, Goldman Sachs India, and Director, IBM Research - India and Chief Technologist, IBM India/South Asia. A known name in the R&D space, Manish has co-authored over 75 papers, with more than 5,000 citations in Google Scholar in the areas of high-performance computing, compilers, and Java Virtual Machine optimizations, and has been granted more than 15 US patents. In this exclusive interaction with IBEF, Manish elaborates on Xerox’s vision for its R&D centre in India and the potential of India as a hub for leapfrog innovation

We have done some early work where based on simple blood test reports and other data that we are collecting on the patient, we are able to automatically assess how severe the patient’s condition is. This is coming very close to what expert doctors are able to do through their human examination. Read More >>

IBEF: Which are the key verticals where you are leveraging your R&D presence in India and what have been the major achievements till date? Manish Gupta: We are working in areas that are of interest to Xerox Services, which has a strong business in certain verticals like healthcare, transportation and certain horizontals like customer care. We are very naturally focussing on these verticals that are of interest to Xerox. In terms of the success stories today, since our R&D centre is relatively young, it will be tough for me to talk about things that are a commercial success already. There are, however, certainly some very promising things that I can talk about, which are on their way to significant commercial success and also emerging as leading edge innovations that will have an impact on that industry. Let me start with an example of healthcare. There are two areas of work that we are driving from India. One is on non-contact based sensing of body vitals and diagnostics. We are trying to bring about an innovation wherein just through a camera, we are trying to collect a whole bunch of body vitals just through analytics over the video input. They could be the regular RGB cameras, thermal cameras or hyperspectral cameras. We have been working with these off the shelf cameras and we have a project through which we are able to infer several body vitals. These don’t just include things like temperature and respiration rate – those are fairly common. We are also able to infer things like the heart rate of a person simply through a webcam. Once you are able to collect these body vitals, you can also proceed to infer certain diseases that are affecting you. This has been in collaboration with our New York-based colleagues, but in the process of collaboration we have been able to infer certain diseases like certain forms of cardiac arrhythmia that is called atrial fibrillation simply by analysing the video input that we get from a webcam. We are also moving on to some very interesting work in trying to detect breast cancer through thermal imaging. The basic idea is that when you have tumours and if these tumours are malignant, they grow very fast and there is a lot of blood vessel activity that happens around these tumours and that manifests in the form of a thermal signature that can be captured through these video images that you pick up through the thermal cameras. Right now we have done some work wherein we can do some analysis of these images and show to the doctors. In some cases, doctors are able to infer that these are malignant tumours. We are trying to come up with a test for automatically diagnosing breast cancer vs a case of no tumour or benign tumour. Again this is not work that has been completed but once it is complete, it can really revolutionise how you look at diagnostics of these diseases. This is much less invasive compared to traditional methods like mammography in the case of breast cancer detection. It is also much less expensive and is going to enable things like telemedicine and things like home monitoring. Down the road, as these cameras become easily embedded in mobile devices or as accessories to these mobile devices, you can imagine people being able to do some of these diagnostics with the help of these mobile applications. Likewise in healthcare, related to India what we see that there is often a lack of qualified doctors in rural areas or even a city hospital. Often you do not have trained neurologists who are able to attend to each and every stroke patient who might come to your hospital in the emergency room. We have collaboration with hospitals like Manipal Hospital and St John’s Hospital. They posed this problem to us that when there is a stroke patient who comes in, if we do not have a trained neurologist available to meet with that patient, can you apply your machine learning techniques to give us an idea of how sick the patient is. We have done some early work that is very promising. There is something known as NIH Stroke Severity Score that is known as a gold standard by which doctors all over the world diagnose the severity of a stroke patient. We have done some early work where based on simple blood test reports and other data that we are collecting on the patient, we are able to automatically assess how severe the patient’s condition is. This is coming very close to what expert doctors are able to do through their human examination. The potential benefit of these kinds of techniques is that now you can have healthcare workers who may not be as well trained as a neurologist very quickly figuring out whether that patient is really serious enough to require consultation by an expert neurologist or is not so serious and the case can be handled by them. In some cases there is in fact some medical intervention, which, if it is provided within four to four-and-a-half hours of the patient having a serious stroke, can really help improve the outcome. So in such cases you can have some early intervention that may end up saving lives. Again these are not techniques that we have proven yet at a large enough scale but we have some early results that are very promising. Read Less >>

R&D strategy for India

We are identifying areas where we start playing a leadership role in coming up with innovations that benefit our business globally by leveraging the talent available in India Read More >>

IBEF: What is the long term vision behind the setting up of Xerox’s R&D centre in India and how has it shaped over time? Manish Gupta: Xerox decided to set up a research centre in India and when they initially got started, they meant it just as an innovation hub to connect their people in say Europe and US with the researchers in India. It was started with a relatively narrow focus. After a few years they realised that there was so much talent available in India. So they decided to basically upgrade the centre to a full fledged research centre. We are the first research centre for Xerox in an emerging market. A key part of our mission is to develop some of these solutions that deal with some of the unique challenges that we see in emerging markets like India, develop those solutions, make them succeed in India and then take them to other parts of the world, at least in emerging markets. And where we come up with leapfrog innovations that are applicable in developed parts of the world, we take them back to those markets as well. Also being a part of a global company, we are also engaging with the mainstream global business for Xerox and engaging with those business units. We are identifying areas where we start playing a leadership role in coming up with innovations that benefit our business globally by leveraging the talent available in India. Read Less >>

Improving talent quality in India

If you look at the sheer number of IT professionals in a very small cluster, Bangalore already ranks as the number 2 destination after Silicon Valley. By the end of 2017, Bangalore is expected to surpass Silicon Valley in this aspect. Read More >>

IBEF: When you look at India as an R&D destination, what are the most significant advantages that it provides as compared to competing destinations for a multinational company like Xerox? Manish Gupta: India provides a very rich base for R&D. On the development side, it is already kind of well known. If you look at the sheer number of IT professionals in a very small cluster, Bangalore already ranks as the number 2 destination after Silicon Valley. By the end of 2017, Bangalore is expected to surpass Silicon Valley in this aspect. At our research centre, we are obviously looking at the high end of that talent. So we have two kinds of roles. The first is research scientists for which we require PhDs. Then we have research engineers for which we typically require a Master’s degree. It certainly requires more work from us to find quality research scientists. But having been in India for the last eight years, I have seen again the availability improve quite consistently over the years. In terms of just the number of PhDs, when I moved back to India in 2006, I don’t have the exact numbers, but India used to produce to the order of 40-50 PhDs in a year. Often the quality of PhDs was not so great for a multinational which wanted to maintain international standards to hire these people. I have seen both the quality and the quantity improve very significantly. Now as we routinely interview PhD students from institutes like Indian Institute of Science, IIT Bombay and even some of the newer institutes like IIIT Delhi and IIIT Hyderabad, we have seen graduates from many of these universities doing world class work as a part of their PhD thesis. We have had no hesitation in hiring these people. The other heartening thing is that we see a number of Indian students who are completing their PhD degrees from universities outside India, in particular US universities and European universities. We are often finding it relatively easy to attract some of these students. If you go back some ten years ago, most of these students who were doing these PhDs would typically want to stay on in those countries like the US and build up a career there. While that continues to happen, we are finding enough PhD students who are wanting to return to India right after they complete their PhD because of the amazing opportunities that are available in India. If you are doing really high quality research that really improves your ability to attract some of these really smart Indian students (of course we also try to look out for non-native PhD students). We have had a lot of success in terms of Indian students who are graduating from top universities like MIT, Berkeley, University of Illinois and so on, coming back to India right after their PhD. Read Less >>

Potential for leapfrog innovation

Even if you look at how home loans get processed in the US and the Western market, it is still a very paper intensive process. You can introduce a lot of efficiencies by replacing some of those paper-based workflows with workflows that rely more on electronic copies of these documents. Read More >>

IBEF: You have talked about the paradigm of leapfrog innovation. What is your view with regard to India’s potential in this regard? Manish Gupta: India offers some very unique challenges often – challenges of scale, challenges of having to meet a lower price point or sometimes a very different environment that requires you to really innovate before you are able to solve the problems that you encounter in India. Often that becomes a source for leapfrog innovation in India. Earlier I gave the example in the medical area that we have this challenge in our environment. One of the challenges is on accessibility of healthcare. So the fact that you have rural areas where it is very hard to access healthcare motivated us to look for these solutions that will support more effective telemedicine and solutions where, say, without using any contact through camera, you would be able to infer the body vitals and diagnose diseases. So that was motivated by some of the environmental conditions and some of the needs that we noticed in India. That is of significant interest not only to India but also to the developed parts of the world. Even in developed markets, it is going to be much more convenient for people to let themselves be monitored simply through non-contact means. It’s much more convenient than having to go through a much more invasive procedure for testing. Even in the Western world, there is the expectation that the home monitoring/healthcare monitoring market will be a big opportunity. If you solve some of these problems in an Indian environment, you are likely to have fairly effective solutions that would work very well in, say, some of the Western markets, with respect to costs or being able to work in a non-hospital environment. Similarly when we talk about lack of availability of enough qualified doctors and using techniques from data analytics and machine learning to come up with assistance to healthcare workers in delivering better healthcare, the same kind of techniques can also be very helpful in the Western world, which is struggling with the challenge of improving the quality of healthcare while reducing costs. So there is really this challenge of how do you reduce the number of medical errors, which are being made and improve in general the quality of healthcare that is being provided by providing that assistance to the physician through this intelligence software while also helping reduce costs. There are several other examples. One such example is from the document processing domain. In the environment that we see in India, there is a lot more paperwork that’s needed. Let’s say if you go to apply for a loan or if you want to apply for a visa, there are a whole bunch of documents required. Our researchers came up with a solution that can often eliminate most of these paper documents with electronic documents that are certified. This solution was motivated by a challenge that we saw in the Indian environment. But these are things that are going to be very valuable for the developed markets too. Even if you look at how home loans get processed in the US and the Western market, it is still a very very paper intensive process. You can introduce a lot of efficiencies by replacing some of those paper-based workflows with workflows that rely more on electronic copies of these documents. Read Less >>

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